


The Bloody Sire

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [1]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-10 17:03:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11696052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: The summer was glorious, after.*June, 1940. RAF Uxbridge and Dulag Luft Oberursel.





	1. RAF Uxbridge, June 1940

The summer was glorious, after. Between patrols and formation, they took sandwiches and towels out to Uxbridge Lido and raced with exuberant, excessive splashing, from end to end, eliciting raised eyebrows and disgruntled mutterings from the elderly women who resented having their glacial breaststroke disturbed. They drip-dried lying on the concrete or else on the new white-painted loungers, which were somehow even less comfortable, and left neat red stripes across their backs and thighs.

Collins became used to the shape of their bodies in the water, just as he knew them in the air from the twitch and sweep of their wings. Pisarek with his choppy crawl, breathing only every twelve strokes. Terry, who had never been in water before parachute training, and who improvised an inelegant but effective doggy paddle. Kowalski was a devil for sliding under the water and yanking a fellow’s legs from under him, coming up laughing, his hair gleaming. He tried it on Collins once, and saw the stricken look on his face, and left him alone after that.

Collins took part in the races gamely enough. Summer holidays in Glencoe, in and out of Loch Leven with his cousins, their bodies pale and grey among the reeds, meant he was fast and slick, and barely felt the cold. And besides, unimpeded by uniform and kit and lifejacket, with nothing weighing him down, in clear, clean water, there was nothing easier – than carving his way across the crystal pool, with a rare cloud scudding above, and the chatter of children squabbling over ice-cream breaking through the rush of water in his ears.

The evenings lengthened, and they sauntered through the village to the Pantiles, a WAAF hanging on each of their arms. Bought them port and lemon, lit their cigarettes for them, kept their hands on their waists or on their shoulders. Told them war stories – as though they didn’t know, as though they hadn’t heard pilots burning up in their cockpits through the radio, or the final fuzz of static.

A ludicrous charade, Collins thought, propped on the bar with a pathetic half of shandy, watching Gordon leer down at Mavis Duckworth. Once, a kite limped back to base with its fuselage shot up so badly it looked like a lace doily, and when they hauled the chap out, he wasn’t much better, and it was ACW Mavis Duckworth who held his intestines inside his abdomen as best she could while he told her what to say to his mother. They were steely girls, all.

The performance helped, though – it helped them all. Careful, mindless rituals. Pretend we are playing the same roles we’ve always played. Pretend there is nothing more to play for than to catch a pretty girl’s eye. Pretend there aren’t great gaping holes where Morris and Janacek and little Rusty Cartwright ought to be. Where Bill Suggs and Toby Pitt-Rivers should have been. Or Farrier. Sometimes he’d almost glimpse him, leaning through the smoke, roaring at one of Terry’s stories, his ale sloshing into his lap. The glint of his wings. Or else stumbling back to base with a thick head, flanked by hedgerows in the darkness, Collins would mistake a shadow for Farrier, the loping bulk of his shoulders. Or would hear his measured breathing in the bunk three down from his, comforting and steady and false.

June passed, a curious mix of high tension and lazy inaction. Three times, Collins requisitioned a vehicle and drove with Estelle Winters and a picnic blanket to a hill above the base. Watched the kites circle languorously over the valley, and laid his head in her lap while the crickets began to sing. Her fingers soft in his hair as he told her about Peter and the hard, grim look on his face as they carried George onto the quay. He felt the rocking of the boat for days after reaching Weymouth. Queasy with the rhythm of the sea and with exhaustion and relief and shame.

He wondered what she’d say, if he asked her to marry him. An idle, hollow thought. Not a great deal of pleasure in it. But it would be a future, at least. Or a facsimile of one, though he little deserved it.

That was early July, and shortly after, the invasion began, and they gave back the time they’d borrowed, and swarmed into the skies again, into the glorious sun, and pretended they were dead already, just as the old hands had warned them. Collins reverted to calling Estelle _ACW Winters_ when they met in the mess, and forced himself to look for Dougie Williams on his wing, and not for Farrier.


	2. Dulag Luft Oberursel, June 1940

The engines were like voices. Farrier lay on his bunk, hands folded behind his head, and picked them out. Mouthed their names quietly to the slatted ceiling. A high spine-chilling whine – Stuka. Low, rhythmic throb – Ju 88s, off to drop havoc from the sky, their engines a shade deeper and throatier than the Do 17s. And the sweetest of them all – a pack of 109s, in perfect harmony. They passed in growing waves as June slipped away. Their engines sounded beautiful – as close to the Merlin as you could get. Farrier whiled a week away, listening to the choir above, guessing at horsepower, guessing at numbers – _this_ number of bandits, with _this_ number of bombs cradled in their bellies, equals _this_ amount of devastation, _this_ number of ours required to neutralise, and on, and on, the minutes sliding numbly past.

The first hours were frantic and frightening, jostled up the dunes with a Luger between his ribs, rattled through occupied territory in a cramped cattle truck and spat out at dusk into a courtyard flanked by low barracks and high watchtowers. Everything done at gunpoint. He took a few gloved fists to the stomach, feigned ignorance of RAF strategy, responded to their questions with measured, icy courtesy, just like they taught him in basic. Then he was slung into a shed with his thoughts and the residual ache in his gut to tide him over. The terror subsided, faded into monotony.

And then there was nothing but the rise and fall of seasons, and the scream of aircraft overhead. Counting days and sheep and German kites. Men came, and went. Brits, Frogs, a few Canadians – always generous with their cigarettes, and usually good for a morsel of war news. Hundreds of thousands rescued from the beaches. Churchill defiant. Invasion expected any day now.

Farrier thought of the boys back in Uxbridge. The pan bristling with craft, the mess tense with the waiting. In the lull before raids, he and Collins used to slouch against the corrugated Nissen radio huts and watch the setting sun make golden mirrors of the lined-up cockpits. Fag passed between steady hands. The mission heavy on their minds. Not talking about tomorrow, but thinking about it all the same, and whether there would be anything afterwards.

The sheds where they slept were stuffy; they’d be freezing come winter, if they were still there. Farrier slept badly, for the first month, although his cot was much the same as his bunk back on base – lumpy and itchy and prone to emit a cacophony of creaks whenever he turned over. He tried not to imagine outside the prison too much. Crispin Smallbone, whose voice was so plummy the others in the shed had a book open on his being a baronet or some such, advised him that much three days after his arrival. That the _what-ifs_ would drive a chap mad.

So Farrier focused on what was true, when he bowed out of the action. Fortis Leader was dead, and Collins was not, and that was that. Nothing more to be done. Nothing more to be known, from inside the barbed wire and floodlights. He tried not to think about his mother, or about the lines of weathered, ground-down boys crowding in the foam at the water’s edge. What happened to Collins next, what happened to the rest of the lads from 11 Group, what might be happening right now.

What kept him sane was this: playing, over and over again, the sublime feeling of his wheels touching wet, glassy sand, the barely-present tremor of the joystick under his palm. The glide of it, the glorious swoop, as though they were still in air, he and the kite, as though they would never land, never stop. He’d never stick a landing like it again, he knew, even if he made it out of here, even if the war ended, even if he kept flying until the sun devoured the earth.

Fortis Leader would have said something brusque, _stop showing off, Fortis One, and get her back to the pan so the sumpies can have a look at her._ Collins would have whooped with delight. _Would you look at that, ya jammy bastard!_ That was something Farrier liked about Collins. He gritted his teeth and did his job, twisted through the air to shoot down other boys, days upon days, but he loved flying, too, at the heart of it, and loved watching other people fly, and fly well. Collins knew that joy was rationed, and finite, and took it where he could, in simple, wholesome things. Farrier envied him that.

He replayed the perfect landing. His secret joy. Something to think about, something good. At night, struggling to sleep. Queuing for slop, or passing the days staring blankly out at the knots of shuffling men. The purest peace he’d ever known. He felt again the soaring serenity of it, cosseted in the safe embrace of his kite.

He saw her burn, over and over, when he closed his eyes. His good and faithful girl, his better half. He’d been at the camp a month, and he felt he might be going mad, when they came to tell him they were moving him on.


End file.
